1) Maintenance may be defined as, "All actions which have the objective of retaining or restoring an

item in or to a state in which it can perform its required function. The actions include the
combination of all technical and corresponding administrative, managerial, and supervision actions.
Industrial maintenance usually refers to the repair and upkeep of the different types of equipment
and machines used in an industrial setting. It is the total of activities serving the purpose of retaining
the production units or retaining them to the state considered necessary for fulfilment of their
production function. Traditionally, maintenance was an activity that was put into action to solve
production problems. Its objective was to keep the process running.
As modern industrial machinery is expensive, it is usually important for businesses to ensure the
upkeep of their investment. Maintenance helps to ensure that machinery is safe, and is good for
workers and equipment users, and reduces the downtime in case of breakdowns. Breakdowns often
cause collateral damage that far exceeds the original problem.
2)
Maintenance Engineering is the discipline and profession of applying engineering concepts to the
optimization of equipment, procedures, and departmental budgets to achieve
better maintainability, reliability, and availability of equipment.
Typical responsibilities include:

Assure optimization of the Maintenance Organization structure

Analysis of repetitive equipment failures

Estimation of maintenance costs and evaluation of alternatives

Forecasting of spare parts

Assessing the needs for equipment replacements and establish replacement programs when
due

Application of scheduling and project management principles to replacement programs

Assessing required maintenance tools and skills required for efficient maintenance of equipment

Assessing required skills required for maintenance personnel

Reviewing personnel transfers to and from maintenance organizations

Assessing and reporting safety hazards associated with maintenance of equipment

3)
Preventive Maintainence refers to all actions carried out on a planned, periodic, and specific
schedule to keep an item/equipment in stated working condition through the process of checking
and reconditioning. These actions are precautionary steps undertaken to forestall or lower the
probability of failures or an unacceptable level of degradation in later service, rather than correcting
them after they occur.

Predictive maintenance (PdM), is the application of condition-based monitoring technologies,

statistical process control or equipment performance for the purpose of early detection and

elimination of equipment defects that could lead to unplanned downtime or unnecessary

expenditures. And generally speaking, it must be conducted while the equipment is in normal
operation, with little to no process interruption. The purpose of these tools (vibration analysis,
infrared thermography, motor circuit analysis, etc.) is to find defects not possibly found through
previously available inspections methods, specifically while the machine is in normal operation.
4)
Planned Maintainence may be described as the care and servicing by individuals involved with
maintenance to keep equipment/facilities in satisfactory operational state by providing for
systematic inspection, detection, and correction of incipient failures either prior to their occurrence
or prior to their development into major failure. Some of its main objectives are to: enhance capital
equipment productive life, reduce critical equipment breakdowns, allow better planning and
scheduling of needed maintenance work, minimize production losses due to equipment failures, and
promote health and safety of maintenance personnel.
On the other hand, break down maintenance is an unscheduled maintenance action, basically
composed of unpredictable maintenance needs that cannot be preplanned or programmed on the
basis of occurrence at a particular time. The action requires urgent attention that must be added,
integrated with, or substituted for previously scheduled work items. This incorporates compliance
with prompt action field changes, rectification of deficiencies found during equipment/item
operation, and performance of repair actions due to incidents or accidents.
5)
Planning is the process of identifying all activities necessary to complete the project while scheduling
is the process of determining the sequential order of activities, assigning planned duration and
determining the start and finish dates of each activity. Planning is a prerequisite to scheduling
because there is no way to determine the sequence until they are defined however sometimes they
become synonymous because they are performed interactively
6)

ritical Path Analysis (CPA) or the Critical Path Method (CPM) helps you to plan all tasks that must
be completed as part of a project.
Key Steps in Critical Path Method
Let's have a look at how critical path method is used in practice. The process of using critical path
method in project planning phase has six steps.
Step 1: Activity specification
You can use the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to identify the activities involved in the project.
This is the main input for the critical path method.
In activity specification, only the higher-level activities are selected for critical path method.

When detailed activities are used, the critical path method may become too complex to manage and
maintain.
Step 2: Activity sequence establishment
In this step, the correct activity sequence is established. For that, you need to ask three questions for
each task of your list.

Which tasks should take place before this task happens.

Which tasks should be completed at the same time as this task.

Which tasks should happen immediately after this task.

Step 3: Network diagram
Once the activity sequence is correctly identified, the network diagram can be drawn (refer to the
sample diagram above).
Although the early diagrams were drawn on paper, there are a number of computer softwares, such
as Primavera, for this purpose nowadays.
Step 4: Estimates for each activity
This could be a direct input from the WBS based estimation sheet. Most of the companies use 3point estimation method or COCOMO based (function points based) estimation methods for tasks
estimation.
You can use such estimation information for this step of the process.
Step 5: Identification of the critical path
For this, you need to determine four parameters of each activity of the network.

Earliest start time (ES) - The earliest time an activity can start once the previous dependent activities
are over.

Earliest finish time (EF) - ES + activity duration.

Latest finish time (LF) - The latest time an activity can finish without delaying the project.

Latest start time (LS) - LF - activity duration.

The float time for an activity is the time between the earliest (ES) and the latest (LS) start time or
between the earliest (EF) and latest (LF) finish times.
During the float time, an activity can be delayed without delaying the project finish date.
The critical path is the longest path of the network diagram. The activities in the critical path have an
effect on the deadline of the project. If an activity of this path is delayed, the project will be delayed.
In case if the project management needs to accelerate the project, the times for critical path
activities should be reduced.

Step 6: Critical path diagram to show project progresses

Critical path diagram is a live artefact. Therefore, this diagram should be updated with actual values
once the task is completed.
This gives more realistic figure for the deadline and the project management can know whether they
are on track regarding the deliverables.

PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique)

PERT is a variation on Critical Path Analysis that takes a slightly more skeptical view of time
estimates made for each project stage. To use it, estimate the shortest possible time each activity
will take, the most likely length of time, and the longest time that might be taken if the activity takes
longer than expected.
Use the formula below to calculate the time to use for each project stage:
shortest time + 4 x likely time + longest time
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This helps to bias time estimates away from the unrealistically short time-scales normally assumed.

7)
Bathtub curve is a plot of the failure rate over time for most products yields a curve that looks like a
drawing of a bathtub. The initial region that begins at time zero when a customer first begins to use
the product is characterized by a high but rapidly decreasing failure rate. This region is known as
the Early Failure Period (also referred to as Infant Mortality Period, from the actuarial origins of the
first bathtub curve plots). This decreasing failure rate typically lasts several weeks to a few months.
Next, the failure rate levels off and remains roughly constant for (hopefully) the majority of the
useful life of the product. This long period of a level failure rate is known as the Intrinsic Failure
Period (also called the Stable Failure Period) and the constant failure rate level is called the Intrinsic
Failure Rate. Note that most systems spend most of their lifetimes operating in this flat portion of
the bathtub curve
Finally, if units from the population remain in use long enough, the failure rate begins to increase as
materials wear out and degradation failures occur at an ever increasing rate. This is the Wearout
Failure Period.

8)
In supply chain, ABC analysis is an inventory categorization method which consists in dividing items
into three categories, A, B and C: A being the most valuable items, C being the least valuable ones.
This method aims to draw managers attention on the critical few (A-items) and not on the trivial
many (C-items).
The ABC approach states that, when reviewing inventory, a company should rate items from A to C,
basing its ratings on the following rules:
A-items are goods which annual consumption value is the highest. The top 70-80% of the
annual consumption value of the company typically accounts for only 10-20% of total
inventory items.

C-items are, on the contrary, items with the lowest consumption value. The lower 5% of the
annual consumption value typically accounts for 50% of total inventory items.

B-items are the interclass items, with a medium consumption value. Those 15-25% of
annual consumption value typically accounts for 30% of total inventory items.

9)
Recent developments in sensor technologies in combination with advances in information and
communication technologies has provided with new opportunities to deal with the complex and
multidisciplinary area of maintenance in an effective way.